In December last year, I traveled to Israel with nearly 400 young Australian Jews. For many, it was their first trip to Israel and there is no doubt that the experience had a life-changing effect on their lives, an effect that will last for years to come.
Following the Israel Programs, we took a group of 40 students to Poland. Unlike
March of the Living which has just taken place, the Poland Heritage Tour is not just a Holocaust program. The program attempts to provide the participants with a glimpse of what Jewish life in Poland before the war was like. It is important to remember that for nearly 700 years prior to World War Two, the Jews lived – for the most part – a rich existence and Jewish life flourished. It’s almost impossible to picture that life now as almost nothing remains of what once was.
In seven packed and bitterly cold days we went to Warsaw, Majdanek, Lublin, Krakow and obviously to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
There are remnants of past Jewish life everywhere; a bit of an old Yiddish shop sign slowly disintegrating away, tell-tale holes in the archways of doors where mezzuzot once were, incredibly there are synagogues that survived the war almost 100% intact, and of course there are the Jewish cemeteries. Ironically, it was through visiting a lot of cemeteries that we were able to gain some insight into the size of the Jewish communities in Poland (in Warsaw, one in every third person was Jewish before the war – and in Lublin it was every second person). The cemeteries reflected centuries of life in this country; religious and secular, the intellectuals, the artists, and of course the Zionists. It was all here. And it is all gone.
It goes without saying that the other aspect of the program was of course to visit the sites of the Concentration and Death camps and for each one of us to make our very personal pilgrimage to the places where most of us had lost innumerable members of our families during the Holocaust.
There are no words I can use to explain to you the experience of walking through a gas chamber. Seeing the green discoloration of the walls where the Zyclon B gas pellets were poured through holes in the roof, the scratch marks on the walls – the last desperate actions of people who knew they were breathing in their very last gasps of air. It is all there and it is almost too surreal and too horrific to absorb.
At Majdanek, just outside of Lublin there is a room adjoining the crematoria where you will see a bathtub. It was the private bathroom of the SS Commander in charge of the crematoria. Apparently he loved to take his baths there where the water was constantly heated and he could watch bodies burn at the same time.
As you walk out of the crematoria, you come to a giant monument that the Polish Government in all their wisdom decided was a just and fitting memorial to the more than 1,000,000 people murdered there. As you climb the stairs to the top and walk around the circular path you stare at a giant mountain of dirt. Except it is not dirt. They are the actual ashes of the murdered Jews. If you look closely, you can even see fragments of bone.
A good friend of mine who was there a couple of years ago told me that when he visited the memorial he saw two Polish neo-Nazis stub out their cigarette butts in the ashes.
What makes Majdanek even more shocking, if that were possible, is that it is literally on the outskirts of the centre of Lublin. Unlike some of the other camps which the Nazi’s went to some lengths to conceal by locating them deep within the countryside, Majdanek is in plain view of the whole city. From the main road and entrance to the camp you can clearly see the city. There aren’t even a perfunctory row of trees in an attempt to conceal the camp.
Bundled up in our multiple layers of 21st century ski gear, we trudged through the freezing camp, which was covered in a thick layer of snow. It made me realise – all of us on the program realise – that people in the camps had nothing to protect them from such harsh conditions. I truly do not know how one person came out of the camps alive. I don’t know how any one of them made it through a single night, let alone a whole winter. Four hours in the open air was enough for us. It was so cold we would get back on the bus nearly in tears it was so painful.
Our final day in Poland took us on the bleak journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where untold members of my mother's family were murdered. Just a few kilometres away from the camps, our bus was stopped at some traffic lights. I looked out the window and saw a road sign. Pointing left the sign said "Oswiecim", Polish for Auschwitz. Pointing right the sign said "Pajęczno" the small hometown of my late-grandmother.
Auschwitz and Pajęczno side by side. I looked it up on the map, to get a sense of distance. Pajęczno was a mere 30 or so kilometres away. All my life I had heard mentions of this little town in Poland where my bubba was from. And all of a sudden, I was a mere 30kms from where she was born.
The lights turned green and our bus turned left and as the bus moved futher away from the sign, further away from my roots, further away from finding a piece of the missing jigsaw puzzle. I fought back the tears, and hid my head against the cold window. I was so close, and yet, I had never felt so far from the truth.
Auschwitz was every bit as horrific as you would imagine it to be. We trudged through the snow from the barracks to the gas chambers and as I stood in this cold, dark, airless room all I could think of was "there were members of my family who died in this very room". I can't describe what that felt like. How? How can I find words to describe this?
At the back of all our minds during our week in Poland was the knowledge that we were going to fly back to Israel. At the end of the week we were nearly beside ourselves and could not wait for the plane to take off out of the artic wilderness and back to our Homeland. When we landed 3 ½ hours later we did not just clap (an Israeli tradition when a plane lands safely!) we whooped and cheered, some of us even cried.
I will never forget one young man on our program whose face was wet with tears as we got off the plane took and those first steps on Israeli soil.
We ended our Poland Heritage Tour here in Israel. Where else could you finish such a program? We returned to the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem for a two-day seminar. It was invaluable for the participants to have this opportunity to speak at length about their experiences in Poland and to express their thoughts and feelings. It was a strange experience to go back and tour the museum except this time the black and white photos took on new significance as we realised that many of those places we had been to, walked through and touched with our own hands.
The final part of our journey took us to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and of course, to The Kotel. There, each of us could reflect on the week we had experienced and in our own individual way, give thanks to G-d that in each of our families, there was at least one survivor thereby ensuring that we were born.
I’ll leave you with a beautiful Hassidic tale that was told to us in Poland by our wonderful guide Yonatan. I wish I could remember the whole story, but in essence, this was it: in answer to the question, “why are prayers said at The Kotel so much more powerful than anywhere else? It is because above our heads are the souls of the 6 million that perished. Their souls are here in Jerusalem.”
